Intent on one great love, perfect,Requited and for ever,
I missed love's everywhere
Small presence, thousand-guised. -- from Confessions

After education at Cambridge, her first collection was published in 1943, she had her first Collected Poems in 1956, and she now has thirteen volumes of poetry to her name, as well as four of autobiography. She died on 7 July 2003 at the age of ninety-five.

Strangers have crossed the sound, but not the sound of the dark oarsmen
Or the golden-haired sons of kings,
Strangers whose thought is not formed to the cadence of waves,
Rhythm of the sickle, oar and milking pail, -- from The Ancient Speech

She was a respected critic of Blake and Yeats, and was also interested in Indian themes; these met in a wish for attitudes to the world other than what she saw as materialism. She was one of the founders of the review Temenos in 1980; in 1990 an artistic academy was founded of the same name, and she became the editor of the Temenos Academy Review. She won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1992.

She became a friend, and almost a lover, of the artist Gavin Maxwell. Her most famous line is so because he took it as the title of his famous work:

He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water
Whose ripples spread from the heart of the sea,
He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter
Broadcast on the swift river. -- from The Marriage of Psyche

As far as I know, she is no relation to the almost equally famous English poet Craig Raine (b. 1944).

At the last leap I shrink
From fall of black sea-cliff and moiling water, wake
To find in gray of dawn vague leaves and roses break
In foam of that far sea.
On lip of petal, margin of leaf, that brink. -- from On a Deserted Shore